While US President Donald Trump’s meeting with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, was trumpeted as historic, in the end it did not yield an end to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. It did allow Mr Trump to inch closer to the Russian position, by dropping its insistence on a ceasefire, and by saying that Ukraine would have to allow Russia to keep its territorial gains. Ukraine has already rejected this, and is backed by European powers in this.
Perhaps the world will try to hush up what the meeting seemed to make clear, in case anyone had not got the point: there is no longer any rules-based world order. It almost seems that we are back in the era of Hobbes’ Leviathan, when everone’s hand is against everyone else’s, where, as Mr Trump said about Ukraine, one had to recognise that another power is much greater, where life is nasty, brutish and short, where Nature is red in tooth and claw. That is indeed how states behave, but then the smaller power tries to make the larger realize that it cannot just take slices of territory from it. By that token, Pakistan should have acknowledged that India is the larger power, and had the right to accuse it as absurdly as it wished because of that. Mr Trump’s anger over India’s buying oil from Russia seems assumed, now that his tilt towards Russia has become so clear. It almost seems as if the BRICS counties are being penalized by high tariffs for having had to temerity to replace the US dollar as the trading currency by each other’s currencies.
Perhaps the most significant development at the summit was Mr Trump’s failure to make Ukraine accept his mediation without being present. European powers continued to back Ukraine in its stance that it was not going to give up territory. One result is that Ukraine has rejected the idea of giving up territory and seems willing to keep fighting without US support. While the US taxpayer has money in the game, the Russians and Ukrainians are seeing their young men kill each other. Indeed, the whole world is disrupted at this battle between such important grain producers, and exporters of oil and gas. The real disappointment of this summit was that the war seems set to continue despite all the hoopla.
